I did warp the door

That welding I did the other day did actually warp the door by quite a bit - half an inch at the top! I didn't find that out until later in the day today though.

Today started with my looking at the sorry mess that the spray can and Dollar General masking tape made of my rub rails. Where I did the rub rails with a brush I had barely missed with the brush. The one side of the bus that I did entirely with a 75 cent paintbrush from Walmart took very little time to fix. There was hardly any black paint where there shouldn't have been.

The other side where I sprayed took forever to clean up. I did in fact resort to some of the better quality masking tape I bought from Walmart. That worked really well and now my black rub rails look really good.

I don't really have a good before picture but the rub rails looked very fuzzy because of the spray spatter. That all took a very long time. The lesson there is to paint with a brush - not one of those spray cans. To be quite honest I think spraying is really quite anal. Sure - if you're prepared to mask everything and spray in a clean room, you'll get a great result. That's not what most of us have. I was painting in a strong wind, outdoors, between rain showers today.

I tried to install the new 5-15 inlet that arrived the other day and found that it was just a shade too small to fit the mounting hole and the inlet box. I need some kind of flange to make that work. As I didn't have anything conveniently to hand, I put that idea to one side for now. It is not forgotten though. I have a feeling that I might have a sheet of aluminium or steel somewhere that will do the job. Thus, after dismantling my power inlet I had to put it all back together! I'll eventually make an insert but not right now.

The back door looked fine. I opened it and saw the floor inside was wet. All the dry sand from sandblasting was wet. I scooped all that out and opened the inside panel of the door to see if I could see daylight through my welds. No daylight and there was wet inside the door which wasn't welcome. No chance of putting Bondo in there today. I was sure there was a fault with the panel so I looked very hard at it before closing the door in the hope of a better chance of seeing daylight.

Looking up out of exasperation I saw daylight. The top of the door near the hinge had warped away from the bus by about 1/3rd of an inch. That was unwelcome. It was then that I remembered I moved a window back in 2014 or 2015 and used some double-glazing padded tape. Hunting around I found it in a shed in really poor condition. There was enough though to use to seal the gaps. I'll have to wait for the next rainstorm to see whether it has worked.

So, a day of solutions and interesting issues. All of the workarounds will work. Things are not as problematic as they were at the end of last year. I've still not tried again to get that God-forsaken screen to work so I guess I'm going to end up eating the $30 it cost from Walmart. I deplore not sending junk back but I'm running out of time to do things.

Thinking again about the problem of the extraction fans that will keep the bus cool, I looked online and saw an 18 inch by 24 inch 60 watt flexible solar panel. Now that can just be glued to the roof and the cables fed in through the hole that the upper reversing camera uses. I'll have to replace that camera anyway since it has water inside. Then I can power the fans directly from solar, using my voltage controller to limit operation when there's not enough sunlight. That will then free my existing solar setup from having to power the fans and will eliminate my need to install a 3rd battery.

Oddly enough this is exactly why I have the two 10W panels at the back. Those were put there to power my twin CPU extraction fans. Now though I have fans that are way more powerful and remove far more air albeit at a greater noise level.

I still have to work on the 15W panel at the front that got vandalized. Ideally I'd replace it or repair it. I have not found anything of a similar size that's also an amorphous panel. I might end up having to close up the holes and do away with that panel. It might be that the 10W panels are all I'll need to power the door lock and lighting etc but I doubt it. I do still have my 30W panels. Needless to say, given the price of $25 I couldn't really turn my nose up at it. Having said that, it could be another scam where I order the thing, it never arrives and then I have to order another while getting a chargeback on the first.

As the new panel won't likely arrive until some point between January 23rd and March 5th, I have plenty of time. That gives me time to see if I need to do more to the back door, change out the roof vent, repaint the roof, work on the power inlet, change the lower rear camera and put a protective hood over it, fix what's wrong with the front-facing camera and work on some Bondo inside the back door to seal up the backs of the welds. There are likely other things too.

The inside of the bus is full of house flies at the moment. I've been baffled by that. There must be something dead nearby (pretty sure it's not me even though I sometimes smell like it)  because I had a few in my car and there were a ton on the hood of the bus.

Part of the problem is we have not had a cold winter. It's now heading into January and we've not had a prolonged cold snap. The most we've had is a week so the insects etc are all pretty much still present. All the insects that normally hibernate are still active.

Having fiddled with the bus today I ended the day chainsawing some trees. I must be not that great at it as two fell on me. Fortunately they were only 5 inches in diameter and 15 feet tall. I just pushed them away. As for the rest of the trees, I had two left to fell when the chain leapt off the chainsaw. I noticed that though the oil reservoir was chock full, the blade was dry as a bone. More things to fix, I guess!

I'm still thinking what text to put on the panel in the back door. Perhaps "Caution. Inmates Inside".